AES E-Library

AES E-Library

Assessing Virtual Teleconferencing Rooms

Spatial audio makes teleconferencing more natural, helps to locate and distinguish talkers in a virtual acoustic environment and to understand multiple talkers. This paper presents a study on how to design virtual acoustic environments used in 3D audio teleconferences to maxime loclization performance, easiness and subjective speech quality ratings. We conducted subjective listening-only tests considering different parameters describing the virtual acoustic environment, including acoustic room properties, virtual sitting arrangements, reflections of a conference table, number of concurrent talkers and different voice types of call participants. The experimental results help us to enhance the performance of our open-source, spatial audio teleconferencing solution named "3DTel" by enhancing the quality of its user experience in terms of naturalness and speech quality.